Your Voice, Please

The issue most novelists face isn’t a career like tinker, tailor, sailor, or spy, but, more likely, the residual from being or having been doctor, lawyer, or teacher. What might those last three share in common? A style slanted toward instruction coupled with “the curse of knowledge.”

First about that style. At least somewhat academic and professorial, there’s a plethora of multi-syllabic verbiage, as opposed to “lots of big words.”  The lofty tone is often characterized by passive voice, rather than “passive voice occurs frequently.” Contractions, unfortunately, are usually avoided. Sentences are long and complex but not necessarily rhythmic.

Determined to foster the meticulous understanding that previous professions demanded, novelists sometimes “tell” and then “show,” or “show” and then “tell”—just to make sure. Finally, educators and professionals often applaud this structure: Here’s what I’ll say, now I’ll speak my piece in detail, and, oh, since you perhaps missed it (possibly because you spaced out due to the endless repetition), I’ll just go over it one last time. 

First of all, novels need storytelling, suspense, and secrets. Edifying isn’t part of the recipe. In fact, what E.B. White said about poetry applies equally well to the novel: 

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

And yet, ironically, the novelist obsessed with being clear at any cost might misstep anyway. Sadly, “the curse of knowledge” often interferes. As Steven Pinker explains,

I think the curse of knowledge is the chief contributor to opaque writing…It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that readers haven’t learned their jargon, don’t seem to know the intermediate steps that seem to them to be too obvious to mention, and can’t visualize a scene currently in the writer’s mind’s eye. And so the writer doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the concrete details—even when writing for professional peers.

Although Pinker’s emphasis here is nonfiction, the task of guiding readers through a fictional world can present an even greater challenge. After all, to compose a scene, novelists must know tons about setting, background, arc, motive, stage business, and conflict. No scene will be successful unless writers collect far more than will ever make it into the book. 

But here’s the problem. The prepping that helps a novelist create a better page increases the difficulty of assessing what readers don’t know or can’t follow.

So what’s the solution? You can’t undo the fact that you used to win cases or still consult or occasionally volunteer to teach here and there. You can remember that a novel isn’t a brief, a lecture, a lesson plan, or a diagnosis. So.

~ Walk in your reader’s shoes as often as you can.

~ Informalize your voice. 

~ Build bridges.

~ Provide grounding.

Tip: Great storytellers neither teach nor preach.

The Writer, the Reader, and the Goldilocks Dilemma

Who wants context so sparse that the scene seems to occur mid-air? Who wants to read thickly layered description that resembles a bowl of lukewarm porridge vast enough to fill a T Rex belly? Every reader, writer, and lost little girl wants a meal that’s “just right.” Goldilocks sampled everything. But your goal is having so many readers that assessing their individual needs becomes impossible. How do you offer a serving neither meager nor massive?

~ Trick yourself into reading like a reader.

“Trick” is the operative word here. You find your scene perfectly clear and your sentences, um—glorious. Uh, uh. How would this read if you didn’t already know what’s at stake? Weren’t smitten with the syntax? Take a break for days, maybe weeks. Try reading aloud, printing the pages. You can teach old writers new tricks.

~Provide context.

Who wants to guess character age or gender, or where and when this takes place? If this is urban fantasy or romance? If the tone is serious or satiric? Clarify the broad picture. Let readers infer the rest from clever clues.

~ Imply.

The human mind has a remarkable capacity to use hints for completing the picture, guessing the meaning, grasping the idea. Clues are fun. Spelling everything out? Not fun. Closer, in fact, to being stuck with a boring teacher. We’ve all been there.

~ Use the five senses.

Even a little abstraction, such as “painful,” “satisfying,” or “exquisite,” feels like that giant dish of soggy cereal. Offer concrete imagery, ideally in original combinations. The first image that leaps to mind is likely to be weak and tired. Keep hunting.

~Construct great metaphors.

Then let them speak for themselves. If they’re really that great, you needn’t explain them.

~Avoid double-dipping.

Readers rarely want to hear that Ed sneered and glowered, or that Nancy laughed with joy and amusement, or that Eloise slouched and trudged. Find the right image or explanation so you won’t be tempted to torture with two.

~ Understate.

The more intense the emotion or catastrophe, then the less you need to say about it.

Sometimes, of course, like Goldilocks, you may have to assess the scene with the detail in or out, the sentence reduced or expanded. Experiment, and you’ll get better and better at “just right.” After all, you’re lots more sophisticated than little Goldilocks.

 Tip: Readers need “facts” in order to draw conclusions about what those “facts’ mean.

Getting off the Ground

Planes taxi plenty before liftoff. Add a scheduling or weather problem, and they idle in their spot on the runway as passengers grow increasingly irritated. The passengers are stuck. Readers, however, are not.

Unless you get underway swiftly, readers might simply opt for a different journey. They don’t want to wait to hear the safety instructions or weather report at their destination. They simply want to be en route to it. Yet writers sometimes treat readers like trapped passengers.

Why not let readers feel they achieved altitude without all those preliminaries?

~ Establish what’s at stake.

Immediately. Infuse that opening trouble/conflict/problem with as much tension and emotion as you can muster--because it has to be big enough to build a book on.

~ Start with a straightforward event.

Self-explanatory incidents generate the greatest suspense. Avoid situations that necessitate lots of complicated set up.

~ Limit backstory.

Explain what you must. Stop there. As Don Maass once put it at a conference in Madison, “Once you’re 70% of the way through your novel, you can have as much backstory as you want.” Not before, though.

~ Make things move.

Not every novel includes adventure, or needs to. But contrast spilling the contents of a shopping cart with worry over some sort of trouble occurring in the supermarket. Big difference between those.

~ Add context.

But limit yourself to who, what, where, when, why. No one likes to be lost. But no one’s reading your novel to get directions, either.

~ Emphasize the physical.

Commenting on the protagonist’s problems is the equivalent of “telling.” Focus on what happens both to build scene and eliminate everything interfering with it.

~ Watch the metaphors.

Even if yours are great, don’t overwhelm at the start. The opening is a place to connect with characters and empathize with their troubles. Make that the focus.

~ Set the tone.

Don’t mislead by promising humor, sex, or adventure that never reappears after page two.

No one likes waiting.

Tip: Don’t request patience at your novel’s beginning. Instead? Just begin.